Our book today is a rattling good yarn from an author we’ve met before here at Stevereads: Rosemary Sutcliff, this time her 1965 novel The Mark of the Horse Lord, which follows the hard life and harrowing adventures of young Phaedrus, a slave in northern Britain in the first century who’s a gladiator when the novel opens and, in an unflinching twist typical of Sutcliff, must face his only friend in a fight to the death in order to win his freedom. This author excels at immersing readers in the sights and sounds of her time period, and the gladiatorial setting of the book’s opening chapter allows her to revel in the predictably cinematic elements of the scene:

Full circle round the wide rim of the Arena, they were close beneath the Governor’s box now. Automedon snapped out a command, and they clashed to a halt and wheeled to face the big bull-necked man who leaned there with the glowing wine-red fold of his cloak flung back from the embossed and gilded breastplate beneath: Caesar’s new representative, the giver of the Games. Their weapons flashed up in the windy sunlight, and they raised the full-throated shout, as though Caesar himself had leaned there.

“Hail Caesar! Those about to die salute you!”

Phaedrus wins his freedom and almost immediately falls in with the members of a norther tribe who want him to impersonate the young Prince Midir, blocked from the throne by the present queen, Liadhan. This takes Phaedrus deep into the social and religious worlds of the northern tribes, deep into the ceremonies and rituals of the people of the Horse Lord:

There was a smell of blood mingling with the smell of burning that still clung about scorched timber and blackened thatch, and a great wailing rose from the watching crowd. The old High Priest dipped his finger in the blood and made a sign with it on Phaedrus’s forehead, above the Mark of the Horse Lord. And the wailing of the Women’s Side was taken up and engulfed by a triumphant roar from the men, and that in turn was drowned in the deep booming splendor of sound that seemed to loosen the very thought in one’s head, as two of the priests raised and sounded the huge curved bronze trumpets of the Sun that had not been heard in Dun Monaidh for seven years.

I recently came across a paperback copy of The Mark of the Horse Lord at a thrift shop in a 2006 reprint from Front Street, with a cover designed by Helen Robinson very clearly intending to discard the brightly-colored earlier look and substitute something closer to the brooding imagery more common to today’s oh-so-serious YA market. Ordinarily, I’d grimace a bit at such pandering, but as with the case of Eagle of the Ninth, I found myself liking the more adult feel of the new design. Anything that stands a chance of attracting new readers for this great writer …